Superman Through the Ages! Forum

Reading a great old issue of the Comics Journal today (#71 with the Popeye vs Hulk cover).  Great interviews with Roy Thomas and Mike Friedrich, as well as articles about classic comics, Bernie Krigstein, and tons of articles reviewing the highpoints of 1981, which were basically, then and now, RAW magazine, Frank Miller on Daredevil (seen even by most of the Journal writers as the Messiah), and Cerebus.  Love and Rockets and Robert Crumb's Weirdo had just started as well but had yet to reach their peak years.

Anyway, besides the above, I was most struck by the following:

-R. Fiore's praise for Steve Gerber's Phantom Zone miniseries.  I still find this mini an unreadable mess, despite Gene Colan art.  I love most 70s Gerber, but not this.  I also used to like R. Fiore, but now think he is generally clueless about good comics.

-a great review by Dwight Decker that has some kind words for  the then-new Superboy series: "A modest, unassuming little comic book that calls up fond memories of my youth.  It reads like a Mort Weisinger Superman family comic book finally allowed enough pages to tell the story properly, and the Shaffenberger art ... only heightens the nostalgia."  He goes on, including some criticisms, but that's about it.

-lastly, comments by Roy Thomas, that tie into this board --the roots of Crisis.  Thomas, who elsewhere in the issue is described as being more representative of mainstream comics during the year of Frank Miller's Daredevil due to his 3 new titles (Arak, Capt Carrot, All-Star Squadron), and his love of verbiage over art,  mentions the situation at DC:

"Now I can work with the DC Universe, which is in such a state of disrepair that Marv Wolfman and Len (Wein) and Gerry (Conway) and I, it's all we can do to just keep sticking fingers in the holes in the dike."

Was the Crisis just a result of hiring a raft of Marvel writers in the 80s?

Elsewhere, in Alter Ego #8 (http://twomorrows.com/alterego/articles/08a-ss.html), Thomas waxes nostalgic about the creation of All-Star Squad, and mentions that DC brass in 1980 called Earth 2 characters "doppelgangers" --meaning essentially useless, slightly menacing duplicates of already-existing characters.

Also, does anyone know if Thomas's characters were ever used post-Crisis (ie, Arak, Firebrand)?

I heard somewhere that Roy Thomas was the force responsible for CRISIS taking place because he felt that if his Golden Age titles were set on Earth-1, his sales would improve.



Ver-r-ry nice interview, incidentally. A few points of interest in the book:

1) It was pretty funny to hear Roy Thomas - of all the people in the world - rationalizing about how to get a female on the team.

2)



Now this is something that I, and many other Aqua-fans, including Tegan Gjovaag, find interesting:

There was almost never a mention of the Earth-2 Aquaman. If Roy intended to use an Earth-2 Aquaman in ALL-STAR, it's a very intriguing footnote.

Yes, there WAS an Earth-2 Aquaman; he was the son of a scientist who gave his son a serum that allowed him to live underwater. Aquaman was believed to be a Mort Weisenger creation, which is why he returned in backup form come the resurgence of popularity for superheroes, allowing Aquaman, the superhero version of Kato Kaelin, to crash on the couch.

3)



WOW. Now this I did not know, but in retrospect it DOES make sense considering the winged horse and all.

Telle wrote:

Also, does anyone know if Thomas's characters were ever used post-Crisis (ie, Arak, Firebrand)?

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I understand that Valda (Arak's love interest) had a cameo in the "Day of Vengence" Infinite Crisis miniseries and Special.  But I wonder if this was only to preserve her trademark since Valda doesn't practice magic and otherwise wouldn't be associated with the Shadowpact.

Still, it was nice to see her again.  Valda was supposed to have her own miniseries, but that never saw print.  (It's even rumored that the artwork was already completed.)

I doubt this is true at all -- Roy likes continuity the way it was; and Crisis cost him the use of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, all of which could be figured to hurt sales.



Aquaman is a Weisinger creation (or co-creation; Paul Norris gets the credit, but Mort wrote at least the first story), but didn't return in backup form come the resurgence of superheroes -- like Green Arrow, another Weisinger creation, he had never left.  Aquaman started out as a backup feature, not appearing on a cover until the Silver Age, but was published steadily from the 40s up until 1971.

Mort simply parked Aquaman and Green Arrow in anthology books behind popular leads, and they stayed there for years.

kdb

I don't remember reading about the terms of his deal in Men of Tomorrow but I wonder if Mort was able to wrangle a Bob Kane-style deal for those characters he created, guaranteeing himself some sort of royalty as long as he could manage to keep them in print or licensed in some way.

I just watched a bit of the wonderfully silly 1967 Aquaman cartoon and wondered if Mort got a cut.  Bob Haney wrote at least one episode.  I never saw it as a kid and was looking forward to it because I loved Black Manta in the Legion of Doom-era Superfriends.  His look and voice were different, however, in this earlier incarnation.  Not as cool/evil/Darth Vader-ish.

I just remembered that Infinity Inc was Thomas' other original series for DC --lots of new characters there to earn 20% of merch on.

Aquaman did appear in All-Star Squadron #59-60, just in time to be retconned out of existence. Johnny Quick had the All-Stars pose for a group portrait for FDR. But Aquaman, Superman, Batman & Robin, and Wonder Woman were missing from the picture when it was delivered to the Prez. Strangely, Green Arrow & Speedy didn't disappear from the picture.

Roy's comments in the lettercols of A-S Squadron suggest that he wasn't happy about the demise of Earth-Two. But I wonder whether his A-S Squadron was a major source of the perceived "reader confusion" that became the justification for the CoIE. A-S Squadron regularly contradicted previously established facts, such as...
 - small contradiction: Green Arrow's & Speedy's hair colors changed from blonde and red, repectively, to brown and blonde, respectively.
 - big contradiction: when the JSA met the Freedom Fighters on Earth-X (in JLA #107-108), the JSA and FF didn't know each other; but in A-S Squadron the FF were originally from Earth-Two and well-known to the JSA.
 - enormous contradiction: the JSA learned of multiple Earths after the Flashes of Earth-One and Earth-Two met in "Flash of Two Worlds"; but in A-S Squadron the JSA learned of Earth-X and Earth-S way back during WWII.
If readers were truly confused about the multiple Earths, it may have been due to Roy Thomas more than anyone else.

I can see how the DC of the time felt that the whole mess was too confusing and maybe Roy didn't help --but the aspect of his work (especially in A.S.S. --not to be confused with Morrison's A.S.S.) that dealt with dike-hole plugging was not the major part of those stories --they still read like traditional 70s-80s superhero adventures.  His verbiage and annotations are distracting but sometimes I'd rather read that than look at the substandard art of the day.

In many ways, DC saddled itself by admitting that a story from the 1950s (Flash of 2 Worlds) still should be final word on the use of multiverse concepts in the 1980s.  More elegant solutions to that problem, if it was a problem, have been suggested elsewhere.

The most obvious solution was to start from something like scratch, with a simplified universe, not slavishly devoted to 50 years of continuity, but not ignorant of that continuity either.  Their mistake was junking the continuity in a story that was basically written for the same audience that loved the continuity  --older superhero fans.  A smarter company move may have been to make a clean break with their audience (increasingly smaller) and embrace youth and the future.  Maybe now, after 20 years of a new, simpler DC universe (ha!), a new generation and larger audience has come to embrace DC, but I don't think so.  The need for new Crisis-style events hasn't gone away --DC just keeps repeating its mistakes.  The only mass audience for the DC characters is on TV where, at least in the animated cartoons, the old continuity and style keep popping up.

I'm also skeptical that Roy Thomas wanted the earths to be merged.  In fact, the merging led to the end of All Star Squadron.  Their successor, the Young All Stars featured the A S Ser's very infrequently.  Roy seemed alloyed and unsure of how to handle the problems presented with the JSA now being on the same earth all the time as the JLA.

As for Green Arrow and Speedy appearing in that photograph, I recall reading that the original intent of DC was that there was still supposed to have been a Golden Age Green Arrow and Speedy.  Why?  No one seemed to be sure, but Roy had the artist include them in the photograph.  My guess is the DC bigwigs mistakenly thought that the Golden Age GA and Speedy weren't Oliver Queen and Roy Harper.  That also explains the infamous newspaper headline in the final issue of COIE saying "Green Arrow and Speedy dead".  

Too true, Roy did tamper with established continuity with All Star Squadron.  He gave into temptation, like many writers before him, to include in characters like the Freedom Fighters and Capt. Marvel.  I never liked the idea that the Freedom Fighters migrated from Earth 2 to Earth X.  That was a bad idea on Roy's part.

Has anybody read this?

http://x-worldcomics.com/YourVirtualStore/html/p18185.htm

It sounds like a good collection.  I've always liked Roy as a writer and thing that his career was great as a whole.  He had a few low points and did some uninspired issues, like his Legion of Super-Heroes ones.  His All Star Squadron was a good series and it's a shame that Crisis ended it for him prematurely.